Anyone who has lived with, worked on, and generally hung out with philosophy
as long as I have and who, and this is a very important element, inhabits
the epidermal world that it has pleased fate to put me in, and is as engaged
with both the history of that epidermal world and that of philosophy,
must at a certain point come upon the presence of a peculiar absence:
the absence of Africa (1) from the discourse of philosophy. In the basic
areas of philosophy (e.g.. epistemology, metaphysics, axiology, and logic)
and in the many derivative divisions of the subject (e.g., the philosophy
of ...) once one begins to look, once one trains one's eyes to apprehend
it, one is struck by the absence of Africa from the disquisitions of its
practitioners. Now, I don't want you to get me wrong, for it is very easy
to point out that Africa is neither the only region nor the only one whose
discourse never shows on philosophy radar screens. It could be said that
Indian, Chinese, Mayan, Inuit or Indonesian philosophies never appear
either. That is true, but I would argue in what follows that although
these others too may constitute an absence in the way that I have described
it, they make their presence in other ways. It has always been the case
that one might find references to Asian philosophy, Chinese philosophy,
Indian philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, and the like in the philosophical
taxonomy. This was never the case with African philosophy until very recently
and such limited references as exist are the product of the last twenty,
or at the most twenty-five, years. Even then, a good part of the current
mention is preoccupied with issues of pedigree. Is African Philosophy
philosophy? Or of the conditions of its possibility, or whether it ever
was, is, or is a thing of the future? Perhaps others who know the comparative
literature better can inform us whether or not questions of the sort just
identified ever formed part of the discourse of Indian Philosophy or Chinese
Philosophy. Worse still, even among those who are most generous in their
deployment of the term "African Philosophy", their purview does
not extend beyond the corpus of work that has been produced by contemporary
professional philosophers. So we are talking about a quite significant
peculiar absence.

For us laborers in the intellectual vineyard, the peculiar absence is
very telling and jarring. For example, I remember once saying something
concerning African Philosophy in a third-year philosophy of law class
that I taught a few years ago. One of the students assumed a puzzled look
and said, in effect, "I hope you do not take offense at what I am
about to say, but when you referred just now to 'African Philosophy' it
was the first time I've ever heard anyone put those two words together
in a phrase."

This encounter took place in Chicago and it was rich in ironies. In the
first place, Chicago's population is almost evenly divided between whites
and blacks. So think of my student's putative view of his African-American
fellow citizens' intellectual capabilities. In the second place, I happen
to teach in a Jesuit university, a significant order in the Catholic Church.
Meanwhile, Africa is one of the few areas of the world where the Catholic
Church is enjoying its most spectacular growth especially in terms of
recruitment to the ministry. But there we were. The student, who is probably
Catholic, had absolutely no clue about African contributions to global
culture, including the fact that the future of his Church may depend upon
African priests.

In all areas of philosophy, basic and derivative, Africa is a
peculiar, almost total absence. This absence can be explained in several
ways. One explanation might be that Africans have no philosophy or that
nothing they do or say or write has any resonances in philosophy. Such
an explanation would be counterintuitive. Were we to grant for purposes
of argument that Africans have no philosophy, it is absurd to suggest
that nothing in the African world resonates for or in philosophy. It is
an abject understanding of philosophy that would resort to such a desperate
move to save itself. Yet one cannot help the feeling that denials of both
types--Africans have no philosophy, or nothing Africans do holds any interest
for philosophy--have played a very large role in the absence we identify.

Another explanation might be that philosophy is simply not interested
in what those blighted Africans think, say, or do. As a Yoruba proverb
has it, the mouth of the poor person is no better than a machete; the
only thing it is good for is to cut a path through the bush. Here we come
to the big question: Why is there so little, if any, respect for and,
as a consequence, interest in African phenomena and their philosophical
resonances (2)? Different answers are possible. I would like to argue
that the roots of the peculiar absence may be traced to a signal event
in the history of philosophy and that this event may actually be the inspiration
for the absence, but before I introduce this sngle event, a word of caution
is in order.

I do not suggest that there is a mega or mini conspiracy to shut Africa
out of the discourses of philosophy. Nor am I saying that if we asked
any of the participants in these discourses they would trace the ancestry
of their views to the source that I am about to identify. Indeed, I contend
that the random appearance of the exclusions that constitute the peculiar
absence, and the fact that one cannot point to any study that specifically
traces its genealogy in the way that I propose, may deceptively suggest
that this is a mere accident. But accidents have causes and the identification
of one such cause below is meant to induce us to look more closely at
other elements of the tradition that is indicted herein.

So far I have spoken of philosophy as a generic term. It has not been
identified with any particular area or tradition. It is time to so identify
it. We are talking of Western Philosophy. This should not be a surprise.
It is only insofar as Western Philosophy has passed itself off as Universal
Philosophy that we may talk of the peculiar absence. It is only insofar
as we confront, or have to deal with, or inhabit a world constructed by
Western Philosophy that we are forced to think of an absence and of how
to make sense of it. And we must confront our absence from the history
of this tradition because, no thanks to colonialism and Christianization,
we are inheritors and perpetrators of this heritage. Additionally, given
that the "West" presents itself as the embodiment and inventor
of the "universal," we must protest even more loudly that its
universal is so peculiar and that its global is so local. That is, the
West, in constructing the universal, instead of truly embracing all that
there is, or at least what of it can be so embraced, has merely puffed
itself up and invited the rest of humanity, or the educated segment of
it, to be complicit in this historical swindle.

I submit that one source for the birth certificate of this false universal
is to be found in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's The Philosophy of
History (3). The architectonic of exclusion that the history of Western
Philosophy manifests, especially in the form of the peculiar absence,
is contained in the Introduction to that book which one commentator has
described thus: "the Philosophy of History remains the heart and
center of Hegel's philosophy (4). I would like to suggest that this text
is one possible source for an explanation of the peculiar absence. It
is as if Hegel's successors have somehow internalized his injunctions
and have adhered strictly to them ever since.

Hegel is dead! Long live Hegel! The ghost of Hegel dominates the hallways,
institutions, syllabi, instructional practices, and journals of Euro-American
philosophy. The chilling presence of this ghost can be observed in the
eloquent absences as well as the subtle and not-so-subtle exclusions in
the philosophical exertions of Hegel's descendants. The absences and exclusions
are to be seen in the repeated association of Africa with the pervasiveness
of immediacy, a very Hegelian idea if there be any (5). Given this association,
we can see why Africa is where Nature, another very Hegelian category,
rules in its blindest fury in form of famine, or the continual recrudescence
or persistence of disease and pestilences of unknown origins and severe
repercussions, or "intertribal" wars that on occasion bring
genocide in their wake, or in unrestricted "breeding", or in
____ --you may fill in the blank (6).

Africa is the land that Time forgot, a veritable museum where there are
to be found the relics of the race, the human race, that is: hence the
anthropological preoccupation with hunting down (very apt phrase) exotic
practices, primitive rituals, superceded customs.

According to legend, the African continent is suffused with gods, the
Yoruba pantheon alone is reputed to have four hundred plus one! Yet, curiously,
Africa lacks God. It is the land where, in light of the prevalence of
disease and pestilence and war, death is a lived experience but not a
philosophical challenge. Ultimately, it is the land where there is a surfeit
of Traditional Thought but, amazingly, no philosophy. I have chosen just
a few of the themes that are considered the perennials of philosophy anywhere--Nature,
Time, Evolution, Ritual, God, Death-- to show that one can find some possible
source-heads in Hegel for how subsequent non-reference to Africa came
to be framed. Let us go to the text.

According to the plan of The Philosophy of History (7) there is
no "African World." But there is Africa in the book and we shall
come to it momentarily. In a style with which we are much too familiar
by now, the author announces in the Introduction: "The subject of
this course of Lectures is the Philosophical History of the World. And
by this must be understood, not a collection of general observations respecting
it, suggested by the study of its records, and proposed to be illustrated
by its facts, but Universal History"(8).

Notice how Hegel proclaims to give us the World without the slightest
hint that his might represent just one way of telling the story of the
world, that this telling may be a victim of its teller's parti pris
which may not exclude possible other tellers' parti pris. No; such
modesty would have been unbecoming of a writer who had the temerity to
say later in the same text: "The History of the World travels from
East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning"(9).
Europe is the end of History in at least two senses: 1) it is the end,
as in the terminus, the point beyond which there is no other, the culmination
of all that came prior to it; and 2), it is the end, as in the goal, the
purpose, the final product to the achievement of which all earlier efforts
were tending. On either interpretation, the triumphalist import of Hegel's
assertions are unmistakable. And the object of the Philosophy of History
is to bring to "the completion of History ... the simple conception
of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history
of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process"(10).
But what is History itself?

We have been told that History is a rational process, that it tends towards
an end, and that it is the object of philosophy to apprehend this movement
in its various stages. The ultimate subject of History is Spirit and the
essence to which it tends, towards the realization of which its movement
is directed, is Freedom. But to make this journey, Spirit gets itself
embodied in Peoples, Nations, Volk, and peoples are to be judged by how
much and in what way they have apprehended this essence of Spirit in them.
This is the way Hegel put it:

According to this abstract definition it may be said of Universal
History, that it is the exhibition of Spirit in the process of working
out the knowledge of that which it is potentially. And as the germ bears
in itself the whole nature of the tree, and the taste and form of its
fruits, so do the first traces of Spirit virtually contain the whole of
that History. The Orientals have not attained the knowledge that Spirit--Man
as such --is free; and because they do not know this, they are not free.
They only know that one is free. But on this very account, the freedom
of that one is only caprice; ... That one is therefore only a Despot;
not a free man. The consciousness of Freedom first arose among the Greeks,
and therefore they were free; but they, and the Romans like wise, knew
only that some are free--not man as such. Even Plato and Aristotle did
not know this. The Greeks, therefore, had slaves; and their whole life
and the maintenance of their splendid liberty, was implicated with the
institution of slavery: a fact, moreover, which made that liberty on the
one hand only an accidental, transient and limited growth; on the other
hand, constituted it a rigorous thralldom of our common nature--of the
Human. The German nations, under the influence of Christianity, were the
first to attain the consciousness, that man, is free: that it is the freedom
of Spirit which constitutes its essence (11).

Hence the conclusion: "The History of the world is none other than
the progress of the consciousness of Freedom; a progress whose development
according to the necessity of its nature it is our business to investigate"(12).

We have to fast forward at this point. Although the passages that I
have cited hold promise of some fecund analyses, this is not the occasion
for them. A few deductions may be made, however. For instance, for Hegel,
only a few peoples are what he calls "world-historical" peoples.
These are peoples who may rightly be adjudged to belong in History and
to participate in its march towards that attainment of it final end. The
"Orientals" caught a glimpse of Spirit and therefore made history
only through the despot. The Greeks and the Romans saw it some more but
missed out on the works. As it turns out, thanks to Christianity, only
the Germans or northern Europeans saw Spirit in its full glory and secured
a patent on Freedom as a result.

The picture is not yet complete. The Spirit of a People is the subject
of History. But Spirit also requires space within which to unfold itself
and enact its drama. To that extent, we must as part of the Philosophy
of History be interested in its "Geographical Basis". "It
is not our concern to become acquainted with the land occupied by nations
as an external locale, but with the natural type of the locality, as intimately
connected with the type and character of the people which is the offspring
of such soil. This character is nothing more nor less than the mode of
and form in which nations make their appearance in History, and take place
and position in it"(13).
Although Hegel went on to warn that we should not make too much of Nature,
he insisted that "the type of locality" does remain intimately
connected with how much and in what way people apprehend freedom:

In the extreme zones man cannot come to free movement; cold
and heat are here too powerful to allow Spirit to build up a world for
itself. Aristotle said long ago, 'when pressing needs are sat-isfied,
man turns to the general and more elevated.' But in the extreme zones
such pressure may be said never to cease, never to be warded off; men
are constantly impelled to direct attention to nature, to the glowing
rays of the sun, and the icy frost. The true theater of History is therefore
the temperate zone; or rather its northern half, because the earth there
presents itself in a continental form, and has a broad breast, as the
Greeks say (14).

This completes the exposition of the nature of History, its philosophical
study and its enabling conditions. Having shown why the New World could
not be considered part of History--at that time--Hegel proceeded to examine
the "three positions of the globe with which History is considered:
Africa = Upland; Asia = the contrast of river regions with Upland; Europe
= characterized by the mingling of these several elements"(15). From
this point on, and for the next nine pages, we are treated to a harangue,
a collective libel against Africa which, I insist, anticipated even if
it did not inaugurate the different exclusions and show the possible antecedents
in Hegel's "Introduction".

Many who read this are familiar with the phrases: "Africa South
of the Sahara," "Sub-Saharan Africa," "Black Africa."
They also probably know that Egypt is not in Africa; it is in the "Near
East" or the "Middle East". "North Africa" is
really not Africa. And in what must remain an incredible feat of geographical
sleight of hand, South Africa suddenly became an "African" country
in April 1994 with the election of Nelson Mandela and the overthrow of
the bastard apartheid regime. Certain behavioral consequences follow from
these identifications. I shall say more about them in a moment. For now
let us turn back to Hegel.

According to Hegel, "Africa must be divided into three parts: one
is that which lies south of the desert of Sahara--Africa proper--the Upland
almost entirely unknown to us, with narrow coast-tracts along the sea;
the second is that to the north of the desert--European Africa (if we
may so call it)--a coastland; the third is the river region of the Nile,
the only valley-land of Africa, and which is in connection with Asia"(16).

The reader may begin to see what agenda Herr Hegel had in mind in resorting
to the taxonomy contained in the passage just quoted. Recall that he had
said earlier that in the "extreme zones man cannot come to free movement"
and that "the true theater of History is therefore the temperate
zone." Were North Africa to be included in Africa, Hegel would have
had to deny that History found a station there. But such a denial would
have flown in the presence of incontrovertible evidence of the many civilizations
that had been domiciled there for millennia. It would have meant denying
the glory that was Egypt, Carthage, Cyrenaica, and so on. He was not prepared
to go this far. So why not reconfigure the geography so that Egypt is
intellectually excised from Africa and make it safe for History? And there
are indications in the text that this was the course that Hegel was compelled
to take: The second portion of Africa is ... --Egypt; which was adapted
to become a mighty center of independent civilization, and therefore is
as isolated and singular in Africa as Africa itself appears in relation
to the other parts of the world. The northern part of Africa, which may
be specially called that of the coast territory ... lies on the Mediterranean
and the Atlantic; a magnificent territory, on which Carthage once lay--the
site of the modern Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. This part was
to be--must be attached to Europe ... (17).

We are not told what Hegel meant by his statement that the northern
part of Africa was "to be attached to Europe." Hegel had no
doubt that this job deserved completion and that part of Africa must be
attached to Europe. And it has remained attached to Europe ever since.
The phrases that I adumbrated earlier manifest this sundering of Egypt
from Africa and its forcible attachment to Europe in the imagination of
both Hegel and his descendants. There are other manifestations of this
attachment. For example, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada,
for a long time did not have an African pavilion. Yet this did not prevent
it from having a very impressive display of artifacts from Ancient Egypt
as part of the "Near East" pavilion!

Having severed Egypt from Africa and making it safe for History, Hegel
was free to zero in on what he called "Africa proper" and single
it out for an extremely malicious libel, the outlines, if not the exact
content, of which have continued to structure the understanding of Africa
in the consciousness and institutions of Hegel's descendants. According
to Hegel,

Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has remained-for
all purposes of connection with the rest of the World-shut up; it is the
Gold-land compressed within itself-the land of childhood, which lying
beyond the day of history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night. Its
isolated character originates, not merely in its tropical nature, but
essentially in its geographical condition (18).

We can now see why it was so important for Hegel to excise Egypt from
Africa. It would have been not merely incongruous but also false to say
of an area that enfolds Egypt, Carthage, and so on within its boundaries
that it "is the Gold-land compressed within itself" or that
it is "lying beyond the day of history." Egypt must be separated
so that the racist attack to follow will have a veneer of respectability.
How strong that veneer is can be seen in the persistence of this view
of Africa in the imagination and discourses of Hegel's descendants.

It should be noted that Hegel had earlier written that "Africa proper--the
Upland [is] almost entirely unknown to us." Yet that did not stop
him from proclaiming that Africa proper "is enveloped in the dark
mantle of Night". It would not have occurred to Hegel, and it still
does not occur to his descendants, that there is nothing African about
the "dark mantle of Night" that they remark but that it is the
mantle of their own ignorance. And while this ignorance might have been
excusable in Hegel's time, it is execrable now. But writing under the
darkness of this mantle, Hegel went on to inform us of these Africans
proper: "The peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend,
for the very reason that in reference to it, we must give up the principle
which naturally accompanies all our ideas--the category of Universality"
(19).

Given the agenda that Hegel had, there was no way that he could have
come to a different conclusion about the African character. Had he availed
himself of the material available in Europe at the time he was writing
respecting African achievements, he would have been forced to a radically
different conclusion. More significant is the fact that consistent with
the practice that still dominates discourse about Africa in Euro-America,
the irony completely escaped Hegel that he had puffed his peculiarity
into a universality and that giving up the principle, universality, which
naturally accompanies all their, that is, European, ideas may indeed be
required if the African world is to be treated with the requisite respect
for its integrity and heteronomy. Treating Africa with respect for its
integrity and heteronomy does not translate into the kinds of deductions
that Hegel proceeded to make about the African situation. Let us examine
some of them.

According to Hegel, Africans lack the category of Universality. This
arises from the fact that they are one with their existence; they are
arrested in immediacy. This means that they have not separated themselves
from nature. "The Negro," Hegel wrote, "exhibits the natural
man in his completely wild and untamed state"(20). As such, the African
is shorn of the idea of a self that is separate from his needs and, simultaneously,
has no knowledge of "an absolute Being, an Other and a Higher than
his individual Self" (21). Under this conception, central to religion
is the idea of transcendence (22), the idea that there is some reality
that is beyond us, beyond our understanding, before which we submit ourselves
in supplication; in short a Mysterium. This mysterium, however
conceived, is the concern of Theology and of the Philosophy of Religion
to reveal, to make sense of, as a condition for unearthing the place of
humans in the scheme of things. In other words, Africans supposedly lack
any Theos to the revelation of whose Logos Philosophy is
dedicated. For Hegel, Negroes are mired in sorcery, worship of graven
images that are easily perishable, and worship of the dead (23). They
do not possess a mysterium; they lack transcendence, and are without a
Theos whose Logos they might have constituted a philosophy to reveal.

That was Hegel. How do things stand with his descendants?

One would be hard pressed to find any text in standard Philosophy of
Religion (24) in which African Religions are represented. Nor would one
find too many anthologies and textbooks on world religions in which African
religious practices rate a significant, if any, mention at all. The absence
is a manifestation of the kind of absence Hegel inaugurated. The primary
reason is that for most of the writers concerned, even when they cannot
be understood to have been directly influenced by Hegel, his rationalization
for denying religious status to African religious practices is adequate
(25). For the most part the reasoning is that there are those things that
Hegel already talked about and some others that represent, at best, further
explications of his submissions. African religion is dismissed as ancestor
worship or spirit worship.

This should not surprise us. In the tradition that framed Hegel's theoretical
postulations, abstraction is privileged and highly rated; historical phenomena
attract little spiritual significance. But in Yoruba religion, the ancestors
that are supposed to be the recipients of supplication range from forebears
in remote antiquity to the parent who recently passed away. Such a tradition
in which those who lived recently are regarded as deserving of reverence
cannot expect to have its claim to religious status taken seriously by
another which considers this practice as bereft of transcendence or mysterium.

Related to this is the idea that African gods are infinitely expendable
and are vulnerable to swapping. Finally, it is alleged that the proliferation
of gods, polytheism, in African cultures is a mark of backwardness of
the One Mysterium, the Being than which Nothing Greater can be Conceived!
Thanks to this mindset, every time that an African intellectual writes
about "African Religion" he/she is called upon to justify the
attachment of the epithet "African" to the substantive "Religion".
We are bogged down in arguments about pedigree that it should be obvious
we cannot win.

The reason is simple; pedigree arguments always serve an imperialist
purpose. The person who demands to be convinced that what his interlocutor
is canvassing deserves to be admitted to the hallowed spaces that bear
the name "religion", or some other equivalent, already presupposes
that his characterization is unproblematic, is not particular,
is universal, and therefore, supplies the metric by which all others must
be measured. Even when it is unintended, especially when it is unintended,
this sort of demand smacks of the kind of bastard Universality that we
already encountered in Hegel at the beginning of his enterprise. Additionally,
neither Hegel nor many of his successors who are quick to dismiss African
religion can be said to know from the inside the phenomena they so eagerly
dismiss. In the absence of some thorough investigation of the meanings
of the practices concerned, the logic that animates them, and what theoretical
analyses are offered by the intellectuals of the culture concerned, one
could not tell whether or not the destruction of the icons of individual
gods is construed as the destruction of the gods themselves. It is as
if one were to accuse, as many Africans did when they first encountered
Christianity, Christians of cannibalism every time they participate in
the Eucharist.

In the final section of this paper, I shall provide some analysis that
shows that Yoruba intellectuals did not think that their gods and the
icons in which they are represented are one and the same. Unfortunately,
the same attitude as Hegel's continues to dominate the mindset of his
successors: pronouncing judgment on the basis of inadequate or nonexistent
evidence or prior to an examination of the evidence. That in the closing
years of the twentieth century we descendants of those libeled by Hegel
are still being challenged by Hegel's descendants to show only on terms
acceptable to them that we are part of the concert of humanity is
an indicator of how strong the cold hands of Hegel remain more than a
century after his death.

A closely connected idea that has remained firmly entrenched in the consciousness
and practices of Hegel's descendants is that the African does not possess
a knowledge of the immortality of the soul. Nor does he exhibit any awareness
of or respect for justice and morality. Hegel again set the tone for his
descendants. According to him, because the African is without the consciousness
or recognition of a "Higher Being" that would have "inspire[d]
him with real reverence"(26), he installs himself as Supreme Being,
possessed of the power to "judge the quick and the dead". "The
Negroes indulge, ..., that perfect contempt for humanity, which in its
bearing on Justice and Morality is the fundamental characteristic of the
race. They have moreover no knowledge of the immortality of the soul,
although specters are supposed to appear"(27). From this lack follow
the many manifestations of this contempt for humanity, cannibalism being
the most offensive.

There are many possible responses to these charges. One is to try to
advance evidences that refute Hegel's statements and undermine his arguments.
But to do so will be to bow to an intellectual arrogance and an insufferable
imperialism that already have seized the high ground of determining the
contours of human being and are merely challenging the African thinker
to show that she and her people deserve to be admitted to the concert
of humanity. This could have been a fruitful way of answering the challenge
had it come from the vantage point of knowledge and thorough grounding
in the basics and intricacies of the cultures that were being denigrated
such that we might say that the challenge arose from a thorough study
and was based on a genuine disappointment that, after some serious searching,
nothing of value was found. Unfortunately, this was not the way that Hegel
arrived at his challenge. The most that we can say for him is that where
he seemed to have cited any evidence, we have cause to consider it to
be of dubious value. The lectures on which the book was based were written
at a time when the African continent remained largely unknown to Europeans
and the darkness that enveloped them in their ignorance about Africa was
projected upon the continent in their preferred sobriquet for her: "The
Dark Continent". Thus much of what he wrote was fantasy.

But let us for purposes of argument suppose that Hegel had access to
archaeological, historical, and other relevant information about Africa.
In light of the state of Europe's knowledge of Africa at that time, such
a supposition is plausible. In fact, where that is concerned, he represented
a serious advance over his successors. One could at least find in his
work references to "Dahomey" (even though the practice he attributed
to the Kingdom was actually that of Oyo), and "Ashantee" (Asante),
a rare occurrence in the writings of his descendants.

The possession of relevant information would be insufficient; interpretations
must be offered. Where interpretations are concerned, Hegel's dilettantish
glosses on the information available to him are embarrassing. The intricate
justifications for the practices against which he inveighed, the nuances
of the languages in which ideas of transcendence, or of immortality of
the soul, or of justice and morality, and the complexity of life and thought
among African peoples, some of whom had created Empires were, to be sure,
unavailable to him. To try therefore to respond to the rantings of the
uninformed is inadvertently to confer unwarranted respectability on what
in more respectable discussions would be considered rubbish.

A different response to Hegel's challenge is conditioned by the need
of those who seriously want to learn about Africa and who, while unappraised
of the intellectual traditions of the continent, do not a priori
assume their absence. And for such people help is easily available. The
presence of such knowledge seekers in and out of the academy in North
America is one good reason to look seriously at what damage is done by
the contemporary practices of Hegel's descendants. How do things stand
at the present time with respect to reflections concerning immortality
of the soul, respect for humanity and its bearing on justice and morality?
To what extent do Hegel's descendants take seriously the reflections of
Africans on the issues just mentioned?

As with other areas, the peculiar absence asserts itself. It is difficult
even now, in spite of recent progress, to find anthologies in which any
efforts are made to include materials by Africans or on African responses
to the questions raised by immortality of the soul, justice, and morality.
When such efforts are made they are half-hearted, tokenist, or so perfunctory
that one sometimes wonders why the material is included. In other cases,
they are conveniently grouped together with others in a kind of gathering
of the unwanted or the marginal. While it is no longer in fashion to assert
that Africans are without knowledge of the immortality of the soul, and
so on, there remains little to offer the eager seekers after this knowledge
in Euro-American academies, especially in Philosophy.

The new form in which the peculiar absence is manifested is in the consigning
to areas like Anthropology, Political Science, or Folklore what African
materials are available. When this is not the case, African knowledge
products are consigned to the dubious discipline of "African Studies."
In African Studies the metaphysics of difference is supreme and overarching,
sometimes grotesque efforts to twist African reality out of sync with
the rest of humanity--a back-hand way of affirming the African's non-membership
of the concert of humanity without having to contend with accusations
of racism. Thus the African remains on the edge of humanity's town. As
a result textbooks on ethics, law, and metaphysics are unlikely to feature
chapters on Africa or references to African answers to the perennial questions
that are raised by them.

What is worse, even the limited presence in the form of libel that members
of Hegel's generation represented in their writings has been expunged
by their contemporary numbers: hence the peculiar absence. Africa is not
overtly condemned as it was in Hegel's day; it is simply ignored or made
to suffer the ultimate insult of having its being unacknowledged. One
is right to wonder whether it is worse to be libeled than to be passed
over in silence. All too often, when African scholars answer philosophy's
questions, they are called upon to justify their claim to philosophical
status. And when this status is grudgingly conferred, their theories are
consigned to serving as appendices to the main discussions dominated by
the perorations of the "Western Tradition."

Having laid out the many ways in which the African is supposed to fall
short of the glory of Man, Hegel concluded: "From these various traits
it is manifest that want of self-control distinguishes the character of
the Negroes. This condition is capable of no development or culture, and
as we see them at this day, such have they always been. The only essential
connection that has existed and continued between the Negroes and the
Europeans is that of slavery ... (28).

From what I have argued so far it should be obvious that although Hegel's
descendants no longer brazenly affirm the garden variety of racism that
Hegel embraced in their attitude towards African intellectual production,
a more benign but no less pernicious variety of racism continues to permeate
the relationship between Euro-America and Africa. Of greater relevance
for our claim that Hegel authored the frame in which Africa is perceived
and related to by his descendants is his declaration concerning Africa's
place in the discourse of world history. My argument is that the continuing
failure to accommodate Africa, without qualification, in the concert of
humanity in ways that this has been done for Asia, for example, illustrates
the continuing impact of the reach of Hegel's ghost. Here is Hegel's finale:

At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For
it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development
to exhibit. Historical movements in it-that is in its northern part-belong
to the Asiatic or European World. Carthage displayed there an important
transitionary phase of civilization; but, as a Phoenician colony, it belongs
to Asia. Egypt will be considered in reference to the passage of the human
mind from its Eastern to its Western phase, but it does not belong to
the African Spirit. What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical,
Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and
which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World's
History (29).

Let us grant that Hegel's ignorance and crudities reflected in part
the state of Europe's knowledge of Africa then. How do we explain his
descendants' behavior now? It is only recently that Hegel's descendants
began to come back to Africa. For until now, it is as if Euro-American
Philosophy had remained in the cold vise of Hegel's ghost. There are many
ways in which the peculiar absence reflects the Hegelian declaration of
leaving Africa, not to mention it again. For example all locutions concerning
"Africa South of the Sahara," "Sub-Saharan Africa,"
"Black Africa" are, in their different ways, reflective of the
Hegelian insistence that the areas so designated are "Africa proper"
that must be deemed of no interest to World History. In this connection,
one may cite the ongoing acrimonious debate on the epidermal character
of ancient Egyptian civilization.

I argue that all efforts to show that Egypt was not an African
civilization are geared towards affirming any or all of the following
theses: (a) Egypt was not in Africa so it, prima facie, could not
have been an African civilization; (b) even if Egypt had been an African
country, geographically speaking, the principal constructors of its civilization
were Hamitic peoples who were not original to Africa. If this is true,
then Hegel was right that "Egypt does not belong to the African Spirit;"
(c) a combination of (a) and (b). But the debate illustrates another aspect
of the peculiar absence. The immediate occasion for the current fulminations
over the paternity of Egyptian civilization was the publication of Martin
Bernal's The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Greek Civilization (30). A similar
and more original precursor based on first-hand investigation of the evidence
conducted by a trained African Egyptologist, Cheikh Anta Diop, had been
published earlier (31). Diop was dismissed and little attention was paid
to his submissions in this country. That is, Diop was not even considered
worthy of being refuted-- he suffered the insult of being passed over
in silence. It took Bernal, who looks right, to generate a storm of protests
about the paternity of Egyptian civilization. It matters little that Bernal
cobbled his work from secondary sources--he is not an Egyptologist. But
he has not only attracted attention, he has managed to spawn a whole new
industry devoted to refuting his thesis that Western civilization has
afro-asiatic roots.

The declaration that Africa's condition "is capable of no development
or culture, and as we see them at this day, such have they always been"
frames all discourses in which Africa is presented as unhistorical, as
if its history is one seamless web with no periodization or any of the
normal highs and lows of historical time that are characteristic of other
areas of the world. Hence the prevalence in discourses about Africa of
theoretical shibboleths like "traditional Africa," "precolonial
Africa," and so on where what is being talked about would stretch,
in the one case, from the beginning of time to when the first white man
set foot in Africa or when colonialism was imposed.

Until recently, Hegel's descendants went one better than their ancestor.
Because South Africa was for so long under apartheid they kept up the
pretense that South Africa was either not part of Africa or was not considered
an "African" country! We find the peculiar absence in the repeated
disjunctions that one finds between: "ancestor worship" (African)
and "religion" (the rest of the world); "tribalism"
(African) and "nationalism" (the rest of the world); "traditional
thought" or "modes of thought" (African) and "philosophy"
(the rest of the world); "simple societies" (African) and "complex
societies" (the rest of the world); "lineage division"
(African) and "class division" (the rest of the world); "order
of custom" (African) and "rule of law" (the rest of the
world); etc. (32).

We have said that Hegel's descendants are beginning to come back to
Africa. For the most part they are coming back, not because they have
come to acknowledge Africa's full membership of the concert of humanity,
witness the preceding divisions just adumbrated, but because many within
the Euro-American tradition have begun to put pressure on the dominant
forces in society, especially those in the academy, to begin to put some
substance in their much-vaunted commitment to liberal education. Nevertheless,
we should not make the mistake of thinking that Africa should be in the
curriculum because students of African descent demand that their stories
too be recognized or because some misguided elements in the dominant culture
insist on learning about other cultures. Others in the academy outside
of these categories too should be grateful that the students of African
descent have elected to catalyze the bringing of the promise of liberal
education to fruition. If it remains true, and I think it is, that the
goal of a liberal education is to put before its recipients the study
of humanity and its achievements wherever humanity happens to reside,
and to create graduates who are required to learn as much as they can
of as much as there is to know of as many themes as are available for
investigation, then the present situation in which we permit Hegel's ghost
to stalk the halls of the contemporary academy must be deemed unacceptable.

I conclude by offering a few suggestions on how the ghost may be exorcised
(33). I should warn that this is one mean ghost that will be tough to
exorcise. In the past when it was fashionable to be racist, there were
many who openly celebrated the sightings of the ghost as a much welcome
reminder that Africans should know their place and stay there. How times
have changed! The ghost has now insinuated itself into the innermost recesses
of the academy and it is more likely now that Hegel's descendants will
plead pragmatic considerations for why the peculiar absence persists.
Such an explanation would likely blunt the edge of our criticisms because,
as we all know, these are lean times and we must deploy limited resources
for maximal uses. One can see how the ghost continues to stalk the present:
the unspoken assumption is that Africa does not offer a good enough return
to justify deploying resources to its study. It is a different strategy
but the outcome is the same.

Another way in which the ghost affects the present is in the repeated
suggestions that there are no appropriate texts or that none are good
enough to occupy our philosophical energies. Recall how Hegel too knew
that Africa had never developed even though he acknowledged that the area
was "almost entirely unknown to [him]". How do you know without
reading or finding the texts whether or not they are good or bad? This
subverts a cardinal principle of scientific rationality--that one does
not pass judgment in advance of weighing the evidence.

I have refrained in this paper from the usual response of waving before
you what Africans have done. Until it is taken for granted that Africa
is part of History, that the study of anything cannot be complete unless
it encompasses this significant part of the world, no amount of iteration
of what Africans have done will move the victims of Hegel's ghost. Until
they get rid of the voice of the Hegelian ghost whispering in their inner
ear that Africa is not worth it, that Africa has nothing worthwhile to
offer, they will continue to botch the challenge that Africa poses to
philosophy.

ENDNOTES

*This is a revised version of a public lecture delivered to the Association
of Students of African Descent at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C.,
Canada, on Friday, 21st February, 1997.

1. Throughout this paper I shall mean by "Africa" the continent
and its diaspora.

2. Of course there is interest in Africa's flora and fauna. Safari vacations
are always a top draw. This preoccupation with nature in Africa in the
popular imagination has its intellectual expression. This will be examined
presently.

32. I have explored the consequences of this difference-dominated way
of framing discourses about Africa for the possibilities of genuine learning
across cultural divides in "African and Africanist Scholars, and
Knowledge Production in African Studies", forthcoming.

33. I have done this in some detail in "On Diversifying the Philosophy
Curriculum," Teaching Philosophy 16, no. 4 (1993): 287-299.